Bookish Thoughts

This is the book I was reading when I got the call that my husband was probably going to die. I'd been expecting to finish it that afternoon. But my life came off the rails, and it ended up taking another week to finish. I'm sure my mental state affected my enjoyment of this book, especially since the imminent death of my husband cast a pall on the romance genre in general. But I did finish it, and I even mostly enjoyed it. This was the last book in Rai's Forbidden Hearts series, which was more serial than I'm used to from romances. I appreciated that there were secrets and mysteries from the first two books that were finally tied up here. It gave me more of a reason to keep pushing through this book, since I was less a fan of the main couple. But that's mostly because of my own aversion to May/December romances than anything about these particular characters. I'm really looking forward to reading more of Rai's work. The heroine of the next book, The Right S...

Sometimes you find a book at exactly the right time. In the wake of my husband being admitted to the hospital, I reached for a romance novel. I needed something light and cheery to escape in to. This certainly didn't let me down on the fluff or the happy ending. It did hit a lot closer to home than I was expecting it to, though, and I ended up crying a whole lot. In a good, cathartic way. See, the heroine of this one, Sadia, is a single mom. I'm lucky enough not to have her money woes, but I do have her hectic schedule. Her all-consuming worry about her kid, her need to drop everything when her kid is sick and her inability to actually do that, her simple pleasure in just snuggling up with her kid to watch a movie. I plan everything down to the last minute, just like she does. I do my best to snatch time for myself whenever I can, and I've trained myself to recharge off of 10 or 20 minutes of me time, because that's all I can put together. And then one thing goes wr...

I've been reading a ton of historical romance lately as I made my way through Sarah MacLean's backlog. So it was a nice change of pace to pick up a contemporary romance. I've been hearing great things about Alisha Rai for a while, and this book did not disappoint. It was sexy and angsty and everything I want when I pick up a romance. The story follows Livvy and Nicholas. They dated once upon a time and seemed destined for marriage. Until bad blood between their families trickled down and forced them to break up. They've been meeting in secret once a year to have sex. But when Livvy decides to break the pattern and stop showing up, everything else changes too. I loved the second chance at love trope. The history between the two characters made every ache hurt that much more and every cute moment that much sweeter. There's a lot of pain that the two need to overcome to find their way back to each other, not to mention the judgement of their respective families. Bu...